Award-Winning GMing Advice
Gnome Stew won the silver ENnie Award for Best Blog in
2011 and
2010 -- thank you for your support! Online since 2008, we've published
1,183 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
two books for GMs. Our
top 30 articles make a great starting point for new readers.
"I check Gnome Stew every day." -- Monte Cook
"fantastic blog for game masters, dungeon masters, and rpg fans" -- Wil Wheaton
"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
Characters and Depth
No matter what game you play, a constant is characters. Players have characters that they can lavish attention and development on, while the GM often has numerous characters, great and small, to juggle. Whether you're new to roleplaying, an experienced GM creating a monster who gets a few lines and expresses personality before the hacking begins, a player looking for tricks to get inside her ...
With Great Power is an RPG by Michael S. Miller that I've had on my shelf for a while. Flipping through it kindles bright "I want to run this" ideas. I planned for it to slot as a filler game for my home group (to buy time for other GMs to prepare prep-heavy games) and thought it would be fun to run at our monthly roleplaying meetup. ...
Jennifer loved Borderlands--in fact, the excitement from just the announcement of Borderlands 2 was enough for her to dust it off and put it into play again. Borderlands calls itself a shooter/RPG--and, while it's a little short on the roleplaying, there are quests, exploration, character improvement, and discovery. Pandora is a fun world to wander; it's a dystopian, disastrous future, featuring vending machines filled with guns, quirky ...
I've read a number of interesting posts this week about Mass Effect 3, how very right it got its gameplay--and how its ending just didn't match. Shamus Young, who used to write DM of the Rings, wrote a few posts analyzing issues from the game's ending. If you're playing the game, the next linked post leads to posts with massive spoilers. Click carefully.
In Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy, ...
Concern We broke for the holidays just before Christmas, but have been unable to get back together since. There are a lot of very good reasons, and much of the fault is mine--my schedule has become difficult to mesh given a series of events and conflicting opportunities.
Another roadblock is that before Christmas we'd tentatively identified the next game, but the prep required made it a non-starter for ...
No matter what game you play, some people love pure concepts and others love a mix--or a stew. Some players will create an exemplar of a class--the perfect paladin, a unique warrior, an ideal wizard--while others build gish--a fighter/wizard/cyber-dragon hybrid with a dash of paprika.
Sometimes a hybrid becomes a new "class" over time--or disappears when a rules update invalidates an old concept. For example, the Fighter/Wizard concept has ...
IcebergTitanic had a question that will hopefully end more successfully than his handle's history.
Similar to the questions on Metagaming, I would like to see an article on how a GM can give hints and clues for a story without the players immediately leaping upon it. You know, the old “if the GM mentioned it, it must be important!”
Example: The PC’s are meeting an important dignitary for dinner, ...
I'm filled with curiosity about 5e, as I'm sure Wizards of the Coast intended with their press release. So far, I haven't figured out exactly what it'll look like, but I've been thinking about it since the announcement. I seem to have different reactions as I consider the different groups and hats that I wear.
Home Games The ongoing weekly game that I'm playing in currently is Pathfinder; thanks ...
With our regular game canceled last week, we tried out a game that has been neglected on my shelf for too long. The game was In A Wicked Age. It features a short rulebook, simple character sheets, and seemed perfect for a fill in game. We got started a little late, didn't get all the characters tied together, and quit a few scenes before we reached the end--but ...
Fred Hicks linked off to an article by Stephen called Why the Standard Social Skills?. It's an excellent post, drawing parallels between several popular systems, and noting some of the oddities for character social skills in RPGs. You should read his post (and the comments), but I'll emphasize a few points that spoke to me.
Somewhere along the line, it became accepted fact that RPGs with social skills break ...
Recently, I've been reading the five Otori novels, and have really enjoyed the complex world that they've created. I don't know a lot about Japanese history, so I have no idea how closely the concepts correlate to real world events, but it's a great, complex world that I'd love to game in. But it'd only work well under unusual circumstances.
Playing in her world is similar to playing ...
Last week, some friends were discussing adventure design for publication, but the conversation drifted towards a topic I hadn't really thought about in a long time. Traps.
Way Back When Way back in ancient days, in basic and early AD&D, traps were horrific. You fail your disable trap skill and you're only one save versus poison from a grim death. Bigger than that, though, were the super traps. ...
The fight ended with a hurrah around the table; Thomas, Dram, Baumain, Xori, and Vash were cheered by the townsfolk as the dragon fell to their blades, spells, and prayers. At tables around the room, similar cheers had been erupting every fifteen minutes or so. My table's dragon was the last to fall.
Organized play is an interesting beast. We just completed our fourth season of
D&D Encounters: The ...
Dipping a ladle into our suggestion pot, I see that NinjaBait had a question about setting details: I’ve been a DM/GM for several years now. I’ve never had any complaints about my stories or settings, but I’ve never felt very comfortable with describing what I’m seeing in my head. “The pungent stench of mildew emanates from the wet dungeons walls as stagnant water sloshes around your feet” becomes ...
At our last roleplaying meetup, we cast about for a good game. We had kicked around the idea of playing Diaspora on the message board, but no one had studied enough to lead everyone through the process. Or so we thought... until we agreed that building a cluster together sounded like fun, and decided that we'd share the responsibility instead of relying on a GM to guide us.
So ...
