Here's a situation that should be familiar to just about any GM: You pick up a new RPG, and you're stoked about running it. You've got the player buy-in you need to make for a good game. So...how do you actually go about, you know, running it for the first time? I wrote about the general case back in May, in the article 17 Steps to GMing a New ...

With the holidays approaching and schedules becoming more and more hectic many Game Masters are likely to suffer from cases of GM burnout. GMs aren't the only ones susceptible to burning out on gaming though. Players can burnout on gaming and not bring their usual gusto to the table or even decide not to show up at all. Here are some reasons for gamer burnout and some ...

During our last session at my friendly local gaming shop where I am a player in a Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game I picked up a copy of the recently released Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons. I am currently running a 4e game where dragons are a major part of the story arc, so I was considering whether or not to purchase the title. I skimmed the contents and I was ...

[caption id="attachment_1778" align="aligncenter" width="399" caption="Snakes and Cursing Ahead!"][/caption] So, this weekend, I had the joy of running an impromptu game of Snakes on A Plane: The Roleplaying Game. And when I say joy, I mean it. I don't think my little gaming group has had such a frantic session of outright Fun in a while. That's not to say that our weekly game isn't fun because it's a huge highlight of the ...

Let me tell you about the schenanigans my friend and I pulled in the 4E game my wife runs last Sunday: My wife is huge on custom magic items. Some are just little flavor differences, others are completely whole cloth inventions of hers. That's how our party ended up with a magic levitating ship.  While neutrally buoyant and able to be pulled with effort, it requires magic residuum (pricey stuff) to ...

In the D&D Supplement Heroes of Horror (2005, Wizards of the Coast), authors James Wyatt, Ari Marmell and C.A. Suleiman recommend constructing a horror-themed adventure with four components. They are: mood, setting, plot and villain. So, it seemed natural to try and pair that approach with some of the other D&D supplements I had at hand and see what horror-inspired adventure hooks we could devise. Oriental Adventures “A ...

Some could argue that the Fourth Edition designers took the bite out of Lycanthropes — literally. The Monster Manual lists only two, the wererat and the werewolf. And making the condition hereditary rather than an affliction makes them no different than shifters, at least thematically. The two shifter templates, for the longtooth and razaorclaw versions, provided in the racial traits section of the Monster Manual, can serve in ...

D&D 4th Edition blog At Will recently interviewed several of the gnomes -- DNAphil, Matthew, myself, Patrick, Scott and Telas -- for their d12 Interviews series, and that interview has been posted today: d12 Interviews: Gnome Stew. The focus of the interview is on D&D 4e, and the hook, of course, is that we were asked 12 questions. We're all felt hats and hot air, so naturally we had ...

The Ghostwalk Campaign Option (2003, Wizards of the Coast) is the gem of my collection of Third Edition gaming materials. Even though it is often overlooked because of its release just prior to the 3.5 revision of the rules, my appreciation for the supplement has only grown in the intervening five years.  And because the setting presents components such as the Tombyards, the Spirit Wood, a nemesis that ...

Clem is stirring the Suggestion Pot with this query: “It occurs to me that nobody has said much about ethical screening and training of mages.  Consider: If you are going to enable someone to throw fireballs and petrify people and screw around with the weather, wouldn’t you want to be pretty sure they won’t run amok with the ability?” Spell slingers Judging from how some players have their wizards ...

I love to give my DM a hard time.  It's just playful teasing and part of how i have fun in the game.  For example, my DM uses large monsters a lot but uses 1"x2" bases to represent them and I'm fond of teasing her how her current tactical setup would be impossible were she using the "correct" basing. Yesterday, after game, she told me "I was so worried ...

Some friends drop in looking for an impromptu game. Or maybe they decide to turn left and explore the shaft that leads to a blank spot on your graph paper. Or perhaps the game moved to another location and your prep work was left behind. A disaster in the making? No, an opportunity. A good five-encounter dungeon can easily serve as an evening’s entertainment. So even if your ...

Swordgleam is looking at the 4E rules, and wonders about this: “If something in a core rulebook looks like it won’t work for your group, should you still give it a fair shot? For example, action points in 4E look stupid. My group, in other games, already uses a version of action points that are a lot more powerful and allow for more cinematic action, and it would ...

Aegon is playing D&D 4E and he stirred the Suggestion Pot with this question: “There is something about investigation, I am having difficulty putting my finger on it., part of it is that investigation seems to break up the group, one person wants to run up, pull the funny bookm off the shelf while another wants the rogue to take a look at it for traps. This ends ...

Most of the local terrain around my house is flat. This part of north central Illinois is prairie — flatlands in every direction.  It’s no surprise, then, that the dungeons we design around here are flat too.  The grid paper we design dungeons on is flat. The coffee tables we gather around are flat. The footmaps and map tiles we buy are flat. The minis we use certainly stand ...