The players in my longest running group never had a problem expressing their characters’ every thought, often at the expense of the immersion of the moment. I hated it. Vin Diesel to the rescue! In his introduction to 30 Years of...
It’s funny, ever since moving from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder instead of D&D 4e, I’ve felt less connected to the Dungeons & Dragons brand. Whereas once I would have worn a t-shirt with a draconic ampersand, I no longer...
This episode of Behind The Screens is called “Bluey Rules”. And yes, I’ll get to the RPG advice for Game Masters eventually. But first! For those unfortunate enough to be uninformed, Bluey is an Australian animated series about an...
Famously*, I homebrew the majority of my adventures, but I don’t write them down. Ideas revolve around my brain like so many aeon stones, and I draw from them as need. This works smoothly in person, as I feed off the...
Yesterday’s Game Design Unboxed inspired today’s Behind The Screens. In it, James Hewitt and Sophie Williams discussed the game they co-designed, Mantic Games’ Hellboy: The Board Game. Even though it’s not a roleplaying game, they described the mechanics that...
GMs use “it’s what my character would do” as shorthand for selfish, chaotic players disrupting the game and blaming their characters. Well, in what is probably my most controversial tabletop gaming opinion, I think “it’s what my character would...
You know what would be nice? Having more time. Or needing less time. But time doesn’t work that way. The only way to get more time is to take less time doing what we do. And I recently found...
A few weeks ago, in Behind The Screens – It’s O.K. To Relax, I said “common advice says to only call on rolls when the results matter. For me, that would come at a huge cost.” Today, I’ll be...
Longtime fans of myself and the network know we’ve celebrated and extolled the virtues of diversity basically as long as we’ve been podcasting. But it’s not just the sociological, representational, empathetic, and basic human decency aspects of diversity that we...
A lot of advice for GMs aims to help us run smoother, faster, more efficient games. That’s not necessarily a good thing, my fellow GMs. I often look at conventional GMing wisdom and breakdown how it’s not as universally...