In combat, when it comes to envisioning the locations of the various participants, there are two general options available: battle grid and theater of the mind. With battle grid, you typically have a battle mat with 1-inch squares forming a grid. The surface is either dry-erase or wet-erase, which...
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Put away the ski mask, you absolute sociopath. This is about doing bad things in gaming, and what you do on your own time is between you and your defense attorney. If you’ve been gaming for any amount of time, you’re familiar with most of the old adages about how to make a good game: “show, don’t...
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All GMs run dry on ideas. It happens to the best of us. What’s the next campaign? Dunno. What’s the next encounter or story arc? Dunno. Should I toss in a random encounter just for the fun of it? Dunno. In my world as a fiction writer, this is referred to as “writer’s...
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Just over a year ago, I played my last face-to-face game. Like most of us, I had no idea that was the case. It was just a normal session, with friends, at one of their houses, gathered around a table, doing a thing that I had been doing since I was ten. Then in a span of a few days, everything...
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It’s time to heal up and plan for the final push. Long rest. Short rest. It is a moment for healing potions, curatives and salves, binding and bandages. The rules mechanic your game uses to create space before the weary and battle-worn characters throw them into the breach is worth utilizing, of...
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I’m currently running not one, but two experimental campaigns on weekends in Roll20; the experimental question is “how little worldbuilding can I get away with?” And the answer, it turns out, is very little. I started with this map from DeviantArt, made four gods, one quest-giver NPC, an evil...
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Over my nearly 40 years as a GM, I have changed the ways that I have created stories at the table. Similarly, what I look for in games has changed as well. At different times during my tenure as a GM I have been a storyteller, and other times I have been a story facilitator. Both have created...
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Different societies and cultures have wildly differing traditions. Some of them are fairly mundane when you look at them from inside the culture that follows a tradition, but if you take a step back – maybe several steps back – you’ll see things from a fresh perspective. This new...
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Thirty minutes into the session, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, our unlikely heroes finally catch up to the malicious war band that ransacked their village. In the events of a single hour, our characters lives were forever changed by the savage pillaging for their war effort. They didn’t...
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One of the great things about playing a large variety of games is both experiencing new mechanics, as well as noticing their absence in different games. Over the course of these Pandemic days, my games have been mostly of the traditional variety. I am currently playing three fairly traditional,...
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Hey you. Yeah, you. Do you know about Gnomecast 21? Why isn’t it in the archives? What are they hiding? If you value your safety… don’t go searching for Gnomecast 21…
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