Summer. It’s that time of the year, where publishers launch new games during the major gaming conventions. With all sorts of new games hitting the market, we gobble them up, anxious to get them to the table. The problem is we already have a game we are playing. And so comes the age-old conundrum...
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Stealth GMing Over the past few years my game mastering to playing ratio has significantly shifted towards running games. I love both roles, but now that I understand more about GMing role playing games I am certain I have become a very different (read: better) participant overall. Sometimes when...
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A continuation of last month’s article, where we took some maps, turned the one of Italy and the Mediterranean sideways, and created coastal outlines for a summertime world-building exercise. Next step: Define nations Geographically, that means establishing borders. You’ll often hear that natural...
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A few months ago, I posted an article on why I use Safety Tools. It was met with some mixed criticism and there were a number of respectful objectors with whom I engaged in a back and forth dialog about their perceptions of how safety tools are used at the table. What I learned was that there was...
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Having a common language between the staff at a pizza place fostered good teamwork. Share12Tweet8+11Reddit1Email When I was younger, I worked at all-but-one of the pizza joints in my hometown. I guess that was my thing. One of the key things I learned about teamwork in that situation is the...
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I remember the first time a player pushed a pregen player character back to me at a convention game. He said, “I don’t play women. I don’t know how they would act,” and I was left asking myself, “What the hell does that mean?” I’m pretty subtle in my speech so I think I said something like, “What...
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Back in the day, like when polyhedrals were high tech, a role undertaken by one of the players was that of a “mapper.” If you didn’t want your fellow adventurers to get lost, you needed an accurate rendering of where you’d been. Corridors of a dungeon run deep, twist around, reach dead ends and...
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In writing fiction, a popular concept to make things harder on your main character is a concept called, “Yes, but; No, and.” At a high level, you present a character with a challenge and then ask the ever-important question of, “Did the character succeed?” If the answer is...
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One of the channels that keeps popping up in my YouTube feed is Puffin Forrest. It’s a guy who animates stories from RPGs he has played or run. For the most part I get a laugh out of these or shake my head at the shenanigans he has had to put up with on both sides of the screen, and then I...
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I grew up in the 1980’s when D&D came in two flavors: Basic and Advanced. Back then, we just played the game and didn’t worry about table safety and how people felt. That was in a large part for two reasons: First, we lacked the experience and lexicon to describe the concept of table safety....
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