Category: Hot Buttons
| August 15, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
So, this is a completely horrible idea for several reasons, but it’s not without it’s own twisted charm: Why not as a group, decide that everyone should be able to cheat as much as they want, provided that they don’t get caught? Of course, the first question is: “Why in hell would you want to do this?” For the most part, we’ve all played with the guy who constantly cheats and no one ever likes it, so why would I suggest that everyone cheat? The…
| July 5, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
I once watched a documentary on the early days of video games, and the particular part that has stuck with me was two brothers who started their own company right out of high school selling their games on floppies in plastic baggies through mail order fliers. They said (to my recollection): “We slept in shifts. I’d sleep while he programmed and when I woke up, we’d switch places. It was always a treat waking up and discovering what he had done, what new features he…
| June 29, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Back in May I shared how my gaming hobby was impacted by my being laid-off from my former job of 13 years. I am happy to let all of you know that I have a new position, and that it is both more challenging and better paying than my previous role was. Having my job taken away from me was a rough but overall positive learning experience. I was considering how a similar scenario of the PCs being dismissed from a patron’s service might impact…
| June 5, 2012 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
From time to time I revisit my Witchcraft universe, which has provided several interrelated campaigns. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s essentially contemporary urban fantasy set in a world recognizably our own. I’ve also been giving it a superheroic spin of late. Last session we went back to it after a long hiatus. I reintroduced an NPC, an old college friend, that neither the players nor their characters had seen in almost a decade. He’d since become a local congressman and he was meeting…
| May 29, 2012 | Posted by Kurt "Telas" Schneider |
DNAPhil has covered the disadvantages and downsides of published adventures in a separate article. I do not wholly disagree with his assessment; it’s one Gnome’s valid opinion. But more than one of us felt that a counterpoint article should be written, and my compulsion to volunteer led me here, to defend the published adventure. (Don’t worry, Phil; I’m technically unarmed.) Published adventures (or, as we old farts called them, modules) are often seen as GM’s training wheels or the mark of an amateur, but there…
| May 21, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Show the party a horde of giants and ogres on the horizon and they might charge to attack. If it results in a total party kill, so be it. But if a single PC kicks the bucket by ingesting poison, that can result in the crying of foul with some players. What is it about the less tangible threats that makes them seem like a cheap shot at the players taken by an evil GM? Part of the problem is that such threats are indeed…
| May 11, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
There. The title says it. I admit it. I don’t like published adventures. In my 30 years of GMing I have used published adventures only a handful of times. For the most part I stay away from them and write my own materials. Why don’t I like published adventures? There are a few reasons. A Gradual Falling Out Published adventures, or Modules as we called them when I was just a fledgling GM, are complete stories for a given game that are meant to be…
