Author: Scott Martin

Bits and Bobs Today’s a bit of potpourri–a mix of interesting things swirling about rather than a cohesive whole. I’ll get back to useful NPC tricks next time. The Art of Consequences Pointyman2000 wrote some great posts on using consequences to drive your game at Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer. In Keeping the Ball in the Air, he introduces a great overarching concept. “The player characters are the protagonists, and they should be able to inflict significant and long-term changes to the setting.”…

Last week I shared a technique that’s been around for a while; much of it was borrowed fro Chris Chinn’s blog and old RPG.net articles. Building a conflict web is a way to quickly interrelate people, and have them react to each other’s fortunes and misfortunes in life appropriately. It’s another way to juggle lots of NPCs–similar to the matrix method Bryan B discusses in the linked post. Last time I wrote, there was an image of a complex web of names near the top–something…

Places are cool, but it’s people who make a world. Welcome to the next installment of Deep as a Puddle: streaming NPCs. Or at least creating several interlinked puddles. Whatever the analogy, we’re making groups of NPCs, while still trying to keep them interesting, with individual details and motivations. If you wind up with guard #2, you’ve gone down the wrong path. This trick is for building NPCs in thematic batches. You’ll find that creating a few related NPCs can produce interesting interactions, relationships, and…

It’s Characters All The Way Down From both sides of the screen, characters are key. As a player, your character is how you explore the world: she’s the lens you view the world through, he’s the tool you use to interact with other characters, plots, scenery, and everything else in the world. As a GM, the depth of the characters that you introduce set the course of the game. Shallow stereotypes, quest vendors, and bland shopkeepers encourage the players to move their characters out into…

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 character’s head, or anyone else looking to add some pizazz to their humble fighter, I have some…

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. With that in mind, I read, prepped, and printed references, and got ready to play. Update: When I…

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 robots, and lots of mutated critters and psychopaths that need killing.

A big part of the appeal is the zany setting; it’s over the top in good ways. Their new trailer shows off amusing and weird elements of the setting, intermixed with the new features they’re so proud of.

So, what can we steal from Borderlands for our tabletop games?