Scrap Your Screen
The DM Screen is seen as a mandatory object to play Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. If I were advising you on a regular styled game, I would readily say that removing the Screen is proprosperous. In the play pen sandbox that are West Marches Hexcrawls, there isn’t a need for a shield to block yourself off from the players. Screens serve multiple fuctions and here’s why you’d want to scrap the Screen for each of them.
Screens Shield the Narrative
In a Narrative game, the screen is there in case anything goes awry regarding the plot. You can fudge whether the bad guy gets away or lay off the gas if your dice go hot. If you have a planned story, it would really suck for a character to die before you’re done finishing their arc. Or if you planned for a recurring villain that your players decided to axe their role before they were even done their introductory monologue. By tearing down the Screen, you can show the dice rolls success and failures. It is a Sandbox, let your players succeed when it comes to tearing down or making sand castles out of play pen.
Besides, we’ve all had a lazy player slap a mustache or inexpensive cosmetic to obscure their face and introduce their new character as the cousin/sibling/alternate universe version of a character that died. Why can’t we? Also, we have more in the cosmetics department than they do, because while they slap on a quick patch to fix death, we can up the ante with an actual new villain whose hatred for the party is now elevated than the previous generic bad guy.
Play Together Unhindered
The Screen psychologically adds a defensive measure. The Director is hiding his resources while they have fiat to look over and adjust the players precious character sheets at a moment’s notice. When the Screen is down, it communicates a less adversarial game. Yes, you and I know that we can call “Rocks fall, eveybody dies” at a moments notice so there is no true adversary but it is the psychology behind it. You are on the same side as the players, not an obstacle that needs to be overcome. You are there to make the game more of a simulation than a competition.
Sometimes I see people complain about players rolling dice uncalled for until they get a good result and then when asked they present the result. The people who do this seem to think that if the Director can hide the results, why can’t they? If you can’t hide your dice rolls, you can easily ask for this behaviour to stop with a reciprocation of trust. I mention this because it seems that people are allergic to kicking players from their tables for odious behaviour. A more diplomatic person would say that this bypasses the issue entirely when everyone needs to roll out in the open.
There is an axiom among experienced Directors that the person running the game doesn’t kill the players, it is the players who do so. If the players are getting in over their heads, you’ve lampshaded that they’re about the bite off more than they can chew. Or if it is supposed to be a difficult fight but they forget to bring, or even worse, forget to use the Kryptonite that they went on a whole quest to discover. Another way parties lose members is even though the players are at an appropriate level, perhaps they’ve forgotten to heal up or do other prepatory tasks in anticiation for a boss fight.
The sole exception to this is a Critical Hit. When a player loses their character, you see them flee to their Social Media drug of choice to whine over how their character died with no recourse. Seeing the Natural 20 followed by hot dice silences all but the most committed criers. At least when the player sees the Crit, they can mourn their character properly, instead of knowing it was fiat that lead to their expiry.
An Exo-Memory Device
The Screen being a very convenient place to put down notes is what I would concede. However, most of what you want to remember isn’t going to be placed on a Screen. In fact, you’re going to have at least one binder committed to everything you want to remember. In my recommendation for Hexcrawl Minimums, I stated the importance of organization. A single DM Screen isn’t going to help faciliate that. You’ll need to look up your notes, like on what date or month a particular action happened.
I do have one page in one of my binders that does act like a ‘DM Screen’ but most of it is charts that could probably be elsewhere. Since the game is not a static creation like a Narrative game where the player’s progress determine what needs to be known, I have a page full of charts for whatever wackiness they get up to. I think my favourite chart is “Peasant Petty Squabble Chart”. I got the players covered when they rock into town and want to know what the most recent gossip is.
Otherwise, most of my sheet just points at other parts of my organization.
