Award-Winning GMing Advice
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2011 and
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1,109 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
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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 ...
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 had this happen at a game? “I roll to see if I know anything about ancient ankthyrian architecture and where they might have hidden a secret door. Crap, didn’t get it. Let me just try that again…” or how about? “Ok, I know I’ve rolled 8 times to try to force the door, but the 9th time is the charm!” ...
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 ...
One issue that comes up at the start of every campaign, at least in my group, is whether everyone speaks a common language or not. Sometimes we talk about whether the game setting should even have one? Something that acts as a lingua-franca, a widely spread language shared by many people throughout the world. With Gnome Stew being translated into other languages, this seems like the perfect ...
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 ...
If you happen to do a search on the tag meta here on the stew, you’ll find that I tend to dominate use of the tag. That could be because I’m the only one who uses it, but it is also because the metagame is a key component in a lot of my Game Mastering philosophy. Looking it up on Dictionary.com, meta is defined as: ...
Every gaming system handles magic a little differently, but one thing holds true in any gaming system that has a magical component. At some point it is going to be used to move the narrative along. When magic becomes a McGuffin, it’s going to break the rules. “I’m sorry Vansha. While you can clearly see the princess is in this castle, she is ...
While I rarely do this anymore I've found that it's quite common in some games, especially those where each member of the team is absolutely vital to its success, for PCs to be run while their players aren't at the session. Sometimes the absentee PC is given to another player; other times it's NPC-ed. Still, I've heard a number of exchanges similar to this:
GM: Sorry you couldn't make ...
A while back I was playing in a game where almost all of us were in our mid-20s to late-30s. The sole exception was a gamer in his 50s, whom many of us hadn't met before this particular campaign. No one had any problem with someone one or two decades older than us joining the campaign.
A few sessions in our host (not the GM) wanted to let his ...
Imagine this fairly common scenario: The character sheet talks about a backwoods, uneducated fighter with a low intelligence score. The player knows that the word puzzle on the wall can be solved by removing every third letter and putting the min order. The fighter might not know this, but the player does. Should the player be able to bring in their knowledge and find some way for the ...
With Villains & Vigilantes back in action this summer, I thought I'd revisit a topic that had always bugged me about that system. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great game at the time and actually found it rather elegant compared to some other contemporary supergames (and V&V's ads in Dragon Magazine actually included a fully statted hero or villain--how cool is that!?). But the one ...
Reading a fascinating Guild Wars 2 design diary about character death penalties (via Penny Arcade) got me thinking about PC deaths in RPGs -- and specifically, about why PCs should ever be killed at all.
For your consideration:
Dying? Yawn
In the vast majority of traditional-style campaigns, regardless of the game, PCs almost never die for good. D&D is the main example, and also the source of why this stereotype tends ...
Recently, Jared von Hindman wrote an article for the Wizards website on why playing evil races is perfectly legitimate, and how to properly integrate yourself into a party if you are playing one. I’m a long-time fan of Mr. Hindman’s work at his website Head Injury Theater. In fact, one of my first major “Wooo! Someone on teh Intarwebz noticed me!” moments was getting my name in his ...
One of the issues any GM must deal with at some time or another is cheating. While fudging is a time-honored practice amongst some GMs, the same rarely holds true for the other side of the screen. There are many ways in which a player can outright cheat, even beyond pretending that the 5 they rolled on a d20 was really a 15.
Cheating can certainly have a negative ...
