Author: Kurt "Telas" Schneider

So, you’ve got a new character in the group. Whether it’s the result of irreversible character death, a new player, or just a character who didn’t live up to expectations, you as the GM need to decide how much experience to give the FNG (‘Frakking New Guy/Girl). This decision may not be as easy as it seems. Three major factors influence your decision, and the first two often conflict: Characters created at a certain experience level are more efficient than those who’ve gotten there ‘the…

As I write this, my youngest daughter is home from day care with a head cold. She’s in the other room, engaged in a pitched, no-holds-barred fight with the Sleep Monster, but will eventually succumb. In addition to the virus that’s been working its way through the family for the last week and a half, a number of other obstacles have cropped up. Our home server started rebooting at random, taking a week of troubleshooting and rebuilding. My phone decided that it didn’t want to…

It’s official, the next edition of D&D is in the works, and those Coastal Wizards are asking for help in crafting the rules. But you probably knew this; heck, it was in the New York Times. Perhaps you’ve volunteered to help out and put your stamp on the next iteration of Gygax & Arneson’s creation. Good for you. But this article isn’t about D&D, or crowdsourcing, or editions. A new game is an excellent opportunity to make other changes at your table. Perhaps it’s a…

If you want an NPC to be likable or to have some humanity, give him or her a sense of humor. Obviously, this will work with run-of-the-mill NPCs: badass mercenaries, otherwise boring experts, or just portable boxes of healing. But where this idea really works is when you want an NPC to be liked. For instance, let’s say you will be using an NPC as a hostage, and you want the group (and by extension, the party) to actually care about this person, make him…

Thanksgiving day is over. The fried turkey didn’t burn my house down or even singe me (actually, it was pretty danged tasty), so instead of some amateurish video of me running around, panicking like a sorority girl in a horror movie, you get this very-incomplete list of RPG-related sales. “Stay home? But it’s Black Friday!” Yes, stay home. (And get out of my article.) Stock up on gifts for your GM; they like that kind of stuff, and might kill your character last. Instead of…

Of course, you already knew that, didn’t you? GMs have a number of jobs to do: think about the next session(s), prepare material, engage the players, drop hints and clues, introduce conflict, convey information to the group, manage the table, answer rules and setting questions, run the game (including all the little jobs therein), take notes, write up summaries, rinse and repeat. (Your mileage may vary; not all GMing experiences are identical, etc.) When you’ve got a job to do, the proper tool can make…

No, it’s not another article on the game charter (a/k/a the social contract). This is about an organizational charter or license for a group of adventurers. While I originally used this in a traditional fantasy game (it doesn’t get more trad than Greyhawk), it can be adapted to nearly any genre with a little manipulation. Call it deputizing the party, Letters of Marque and Reprisal, or a license to carry weapons. I had each player sign their character’s name, and when new characters joined, they…