For a cooperative hobby we’re still a pretty competitive bunch whether it’s old school tournament modules scoring a party’s progress through an adventure, the American Idol styled RPG Superstar (and its successors) helping the industry find new designers or...
GenCon is fast approaching and with it Pathfinder’s second edition rules. It seems like an ideal time to revisit the weird prompt concept, after all, we’re all going need adventure ideas either for pickup games at the con or...
Continuing along with the focused GM tricks of the past few posts I thought I’d talk about posing questions. I know I talk a lot about lines of communication between the players and the GM. I’m not talking about...
Keeping with the plan from two weeks ago I thought I’d hit and expand on the next short piece of advice from my bullet point list: Spotlight the PCs. Your player’s characters should reside at the center of your...
This week I thought I’d survey a few short tips for GMs to use in their games. But as I began writing my first entry about splitting the party I discovered I had a lot more to say than...
Stories can be told in a wide variety of ways using flash-backs, flash-forwards, skipping to the side to tell a part of the narrative from a different character’s point of view but in RPGs we often only tell stories...
On this network’s flagship podcast, Ryan and Perram had a lively discussion about backgrounds. Their conversation touched on things I’ve been thinking about lately as well so I figured why not examine a few of those things as a...
It has never been cooler to play RPGs than it is right now. This is due to several factors beginning with the mainstream acceptance of geek and nerd culture but it doesn’t end there. Vocal celebrity support of the...
Or Friends Don’t Let GMs World Build Alone. I hate to use the phrase crowdsourcing in terms of world building but it’s mostly appropriate. Maybe better would be player-sourced world building. Well whatever we decide to call it I...
Writer’s Block Confessional This week when I sat down to write my blog my brain quit. I had too many ideas and no ideas. My ideas were like trying to catch the tide in your hands. Ideas would crash...