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
How long is it okay to make a player wait to rejoin the game after losing a character?
As I peruse RPG forums or read articles, I'm struck by the number of times I've come across some variant of this scenario:
Rob Roleplayer finally gets to play in Mr. Legendary GM's totally awesome campaign. Much fun was had by all and Rob Roleplayer remembers, with fondness, his character imprisoned for ...
At the beginning of my last game session I asked my players if any of them spent their experience points (this for WitchCraft, if it matters). Only one of them did, and he announced that he'd spent some points on improving his Martial Arts. That's when I threw him a curve ball.
I asked him to justify it.
He looked stunned, primarily because it's not something I normally ask. I ...
As I write this, I'm waiting for Hurricane Irene to arrive within hours. Being a Pennsylvanian (and New Jerseyan before that), I'm not used to dealing with hurricanes (or earthquakes for that matter - now both events in one week!). We all know it's coming, preparations have been made and evacuations in highly threatened areas are underway. Given that Irene is taking her sweet time to get here, ...
I've seen it a thousand times. Two PCs are facing a problem and some variation of the following exchange occurs:
GM (looking at Player 1): What do you do?
Player 1: I'm going to do X.
Player 2 (glancing at Player 1's character sheet): X? Are you kidding. You have Y, why wouldn't you use that?
Player 1: Fine, I'll use Y then.
This is a classic example of a player using OPC ...
2011 proved to be an interesting year for me at GenCon. Normally, I have large blocks of time to hit the dealer hall or meet people. This year, my schedule was crammed, not the least because I only chose to attend 3 days without cutting back on my usual number of events.
As a Gnomie, this was a special con. We won our second silver ENnie (I have it ...
Recently I returned to a WitchCraft campaign that I originally ran back in 2001-2003. Rather than pick up where we left off, I advanced the timeline to the present day. The young college student PCs of the first campaign were now hitting 30, with professional careers and families. The new campaign had a very different feel as a result. As my group (ranging from the mid-30s to early ...
Should players expect that all scenes/encounters be defeatable?
I don't play D&D and its derivitaves all that often but when I do I notice that players tend to approach every encounter with an expectation that their character sheets have enough on them to get through it. If a monster or monsters confront the characters, the question is often not "should we face this or flee" but rather "how many ...
Have you ever killed a PC through fiat?
A while back I was running a street-level superheroes game. Realism (in as much as any game is "realistic") was emphasized, to the point that no one wore spandex and vigilante activity would get you arrested if caught. We also started with none of the PCs knowing each other, as relationships were supposed to be forged in game.
In what was going ...
Driftwood: Hard and Soft Scenes is the first in a line of articles that highlights an aspect of a particular RPG and looks at how it can be applied to other RPGs (see Drift in Gnomenclature). It's also probably the title of a porn movie.
Adventures in 7th Sea use a scheme of "hard scenes" and "soft scenes." Hard scenes are encounters that need to occur through the course of an adventure. ...
I finally ran the Cthulhu Dinner Party event this past Saturday. I laid out the battle plan in my previous article; this is the post game report.
Overall it was a smashing success and something I'd definitely consider doing again. We did have a few hiccups along the way, but as my wife said it was like the first time we hosted Thanksgiving Dinner. We'll be better organized next ...
In two weeks my wife and I are hosting a dinner party that involves Trail of Cthulhu. This is an idea that I'd been kicking around for a few years. I thought it'd be a fun opportunity to "dress up" and play a one-shot while having an elegant dinner (using the table settings and crystal we got for our wedding and have only used once).
I thought I'd lay ...
A few weeks ago there was a funny (if stereotypical) episode of Community that revolved around a game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (yes, it's not a mistake). While the show did a very good job of portraying a session, probably the best I've ever seen in a television episode (as opposed to, say, Jesse), there were some deviations in the way they presented the mechanics. One of ...
Mashing genres can be a fun way to put a fresh spin on a new campaign. It allows you to to draw upon tropes and plots from one genre and give them a new "desktop theme." When I started this series of articles I planned on keeping to the hypothetical, but as it turns out I began a new campaign last weekend that is a genre mash-up.
At the risk ...
Some of my current freelancing projects involve All for One: Regime Diabolique, which uses the Ubiquity rules system (pioneered in Hollow Earth Expedition). Under this system, you roll a number of dice and count the "evens" as successes. It doesn't matter what dice you roll; indeed, you could even use coins or playing cards if you wanted to.
At first, my players thought it was pretty sweet that they got ...
When I was tapped to write for Dragon Age last year, one of the first things that struck me was the fact that character ability scores were randomly generated in order (with the caveats that the results were weighted to give more bonuses than penalties, the players could switch any two scores, and there are opportunities later to increase the bonuses).
This struck me at first as rather quaint ...
