Not too long ago, I had my performance review at work. Most people dread this event, but I always look forward to it. For me the performance review is a chance to get the recognition for my accomplishments for the year, but more importantly, it’s a chance to get a list of things that I can improve upon for the upcoming year. I am always interested in improving ...

No GM should be an island of ideas. As a GM we are a creative bunch and have many ideas floating around our head: a plot for a future session, a killer encounter, a new artifact, an NPC, etc. Let’s be honest not all of our ideas are great, and worst a lot of them sound great to us, but fail to impress the players when we drop ...

Excuse the cliché of telling you about my campaign, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. Except that this is about the techniques used to run the game, and not the clever divine dynamic or the really cool twists on the basic fantasy races. My last campaign was traditional D&D v3.5, which I ran almost entirely from a laptop, learning enough to write not ...

Regular readers know that the gnomes have been working on a secret project for some time now, and we've been tight-lipped about details. Thanks to the way GenCon event registration is timed, as of today our first official teaser about the project has gone live: SEM1009173 Eureka! Cooking Up Adventure Plots with Gnome Stew Join the infamous Gnomes of Gnome Stew, and learn about their first book: Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to ...

When I'm playing but not GMing (as is the case right now), part of my brain is always watching -- and trying to learn from -- my GMs. During my group's Eberron campaign session last night, I got to watch a great GM handle a tricky balancing act brilliantly, and I wanted to share some of what I took away from that experience. The Quick Setup The PCs in this campaign ...

No, you're not all gnomes named Myers Briggs... Myers Briggs is a classification system that's popular in high school sociology classes and business books. Quizzes to determine your personality type were also frequently passed around in email from my friends and relatives; this quiz classifies various Harry Potter characters and tells you who you overlap. (For this set of phrasings, I'm Harry Potter, strangely. To skip the ...

Reading fellow Gnome Scott Martin’s article on “Setting vs. Cast” made me realize that I generally don’t enjoy RPG settings borrowed from books, movies, or television.  (For the sake of this article, let’s call them literary settings.) Asking “Why not?” led to this article, which includes advice for using literary settings. I recognize the popularity of literary settings; entire systems are written for them. But they ...

My wife and I are enjoying a free trial of the Star Trek Online game this week. So far, the game is fun: you get the feel of the universe, the uniforms you know and love, plus all of the technology, aliens, ship combat and a good mix of away missions. So far, it feels like a new Star Trek TV series, with your character as the ...

Stew reader LesInk threw an interesting morsel into the suggestion pot the other day. It is about the concept of railroading and how you force an event to happen when the plot absolutely calls for it. The concept is an interesting one, and LesInk put forth a great solution along with the question and story.   Dear Gnomies, I believe ...

Welcome to the second digest of Gnome Stew's bite-sized game mastering tips, all of which were originally posted on Twitter (@gnomestew) from July 14, 2009 through February 7, 2010. (Punctuality: not always our strong suit...) We archive our GMing tweets in this article series, making them searchable and collecting them for readers who don't use Twitter. Bite-sized tips can be a great source of inspiration, and can help keep ...

Aside from a lack of fear, one of the biggest problems in having player characters act realistically in a combat situation is the use of hit points (or a similar mechanic). The player knows how much damage her PC can soak before falling and can make tactical decisions based on the amount of damage that a creature/armed villain/martial artist/trap doles out. Ultimately, this is a matter of security. Players ...

Over the last couple of years, I have been lucky to play in two linked series of Star Wars Saga games. My experience with the system has been as a player, but my GM and I have discussed the system quite a bit. He'll chime in with comments in italics throughout the article. Katana Geldar wrote a nice post about the recent announcement by Wizards of the ...

Are there GMing questions you'd like to ask, but that you're kind of of embarrassed about asking? Questions that seem too basic, too simple, or too should-be-obvious to ask other GMs in person? Here on the Stew, we love practical GMing questions -- and there's no shame in asking them. Any of them. I've been GMing for over 20 years, and I still fuck up on a semi-regular basis. All of ...

One of the challenges in a new campaign occurs when the players discover that they do not like their characters. Given time, the lack of excitement on the players’ part will degrade any efforts to sustain the campaign and ultimately lead to its collapse. Even the greatest plotline or the most richly described world will not hold your players at the table if they have no passion or ...

As a GM, you have access to a lot of information the players never see. This can be mutually frustrating, because you have ideas and concepts you never get to illustrate, and the players may have holes in their picture of the game world that they would like to understand. One of the less common techniques for giving the players a broader view of the world you’ve created ...