Award-Winning GMing Advice
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A discussion on the GM Mastery mailing list (an adjunct to Johnn Four’s excellent Roleplaying Tips weekly e-zine) involved speeding up game play, and the concept of the Standing Operating Procedure was brought up. For routine and repetitive tasks (setting camp, visiting town, etc), SOPs are a handy technique to quickly put the players and GM on the same page. In addition, they allow the GM to handle ...
A while back I was playing in a game where almost all of us were in our mid-20s to late-30s. The sole exception was a gamer in his 50s, whom many of us hadn't met before this particular campaign. No one had any problem with someone one or two decades older than us joining the campaign.
A few sessions in our host (not the GM) wanted to let his ...
One our of intrepid readers, Chando42, posed a suggestion in the Gnome Suggestion Pot that many of us have struggled with over our GMing careers: having good player interaction with our NPCs. Characters that inspire and help drive your adventures versus stale cardboard cutouts that sit there to disseminate information (or hit points) and little else. Or the ones that make you mock them. Mercilessly. First we'll start ...
This set of links is eclectic, but does have a few themes. Major topics this week include interesting ways to rethink your campaign at the level of what scenes an adventure contains, how your scenes/encounters can be structured to show distinct regions and reflect player actions, and how to coordinate a game heavy on characterization when different players show up each week. Then we peek into the ...
Before GenCon, one of the requests that I got, was to review the new Vincent Baker game Apocalypse World. We at the Stew love to please our readers, so I took some time at GenCon, and got a chance to play a small demo of Apocalypse World (AW) with it’s creator, Vincent Baker, as well as picking up a copy of the book.
My intention was to do ...
More and more recently I've heard the term "genre mash-up" used to describe RPGs that heavily draw on two sources of inspiration that, on first glance, don't seem to go together. While the term is new, the idea is not. The novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is a 19th century example of mashing science with horror, while the Shadowrun RPG mashed traditional fantasy tropes with cyberpunk. And who ...
I'm no Luddite, but I've always been more of an analog campaign management kind of guy. I type up adventures and notes on my desktop, but print them out to use at the table; I've used Google Maps to create a custom "living" map for a modern game, but that game also ended with a two-inch thick binder of material on my shelf.
Having been out of the GM's ...
One of my initial disappointments with the Fourth Edition’s Player’s Handbook was lack of space devoted to development of a character’s story.
Not their abilities — their individual story.
As a GM, I love when players bring a concept to the table that allows their growth along storylines. Extra feats and class abilities are fine and dandy — but these are basically add-ons to a character’s combat capabilities.
Missing from 4E ...
Imagine this fairly common scenario: The character sheet talks about a backwoods, uneducated fighter with a low intelligence score. The player knows that the word puzzle on the wall can be solved by removing every third letter and putting the min order. The fighter might not know this, but the player does. Should the player be able to bring in their knowledge and find some way for the ...
Dislcaimer--This is not some Legend of Zelda fanfic. If you want that stuff, go to the experts.
While we Gnomes work tirelessly at making our stew and serving up great GMing advice, when we are not tending the giant cauldron, we are like you: out on the Internet surfing for drow p0rn RPG blogs and podcasts. We wanted to share some of our current favorite ...
On a recent trip, my wife and her friends wound up teaching classes during the day. I spent a few days exploring the city, but also spent a couple of afternoons gaming with their teenage sons.
It's been a while since I was a teen; I admit that I remember the endless hours for gaming with a great deal of nostalgia. So it was neat to get to play ...
With Villains & Vigilantes back in action this summer, I thought I'd revisit a topic that had always bugged me about that system. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great game at the time and actually found it rather elegant compared to some other contemporary supergames (and V&V's ads in Dragon Magazine actually included a fully statted hero or villain--how cool is that!?). But the one ...
There is a Greek legend about a thing called the Gordian Knot, a knot so complex that no one could untie it no matter how long they attempted to work it out. Then along comes this douche bag Alexander The Great, who whips out his sword and quick as you please slices the thing in two. He then goes on to conquer most of the known world. Ever ...
In le Pot de Suggestiones, Gnome Stew reader scoopsy asked this excellent question:
I’m fairly good at coming up with adventures and adventure hooks (and Eureka! is there for those times when I’m not), but I frequently find it difficult to tie them into a larger, compelling campaign. If we spend more than 2-3 sessions on a villain or plotline, it seems I start losing people and then it’s ...
It’s that time again, when summer starts to wind down and back-to-school sales start to spool up. In honor or celebration (or simple vote-whoring), many states in the US will have Tax Free Weekends. For two reasons, this is an excellent time to stock up on school gaming supplies (sorry, but Cheetos are still taxed). Reason Number One is simple: No sales taxes on school supplies. The ...
