Recently I’ve had a few conversations about using safety tools in role playing games and it seems like a topic worthy of bringing up with the Gnome Stew audience. Whether you run a high fantasy dungeon crawl or a modern day police noir game, safety tools offer the opportunity for deeper...
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If you’re like most people, you’re capable of effectively keeping track of seven plus or minus two “things” at a time. This phenomenon is sometimes called “the magical number seven plus or minus two.” We can remember and juggle around seven pieces of information—numbers, words,...
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No matter how much you love gaming, inevitably there may come a point when you just don’t have the creative juices flowing to make the magic happen at the table. Sometimes it’s life — for example, you just got laid off, or you have a new baby, or there’s another major shift going on....
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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 One solution I am particularly fond of is to figure out how the languages relate to one another and draw up a relationship mapping between the spoken tongues. This can allow for the GM...
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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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