Behind the Screens Archive

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...

Last Saturday, at my RenegadeCon How To Play: G.I. JOE Roleplaying Game panel, I talked about how Scarlett‘s school has a rule for their playground: Don’t climb the slide. I went on to explain that, as a GM, letting my players...

Now that you know your role and have basked in your power, it’s time to bring you back down to Earth, my fellow GMs. In order to do our job, and enjoy all of the benefits of being a Game...

RPG memes love to cast the GM as the victim of player decisions. In these memes, we’re frustrated that players went off on tangents with NPCs, bamboozled by unexpected player comments, vexed by powerful builds, and annoyed by silliness....

Those familiar with this blog surely noticed that in Behind The Screens, I refer to my readers as “my fellow GMs”.  I got this from a professor at teacher’s college. When he addressed the class, he didn’t call us...