Posts Tagged by campaigns
| October 17, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Over the past few years, it’s become clear to me that I suck at pitching games to my players. That realization goes hand in hand with another: I’ve muddled my way through this key aspect of being a GM for 20-plus years without ever really knowing what I was doing. Sometimes I pitch a game and it gets traction right away, and we play it and it’s fun, and unicorns are fucking while an angelic choir sings in the background, but I have no real…
| August 16, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Guest author David Miller is a displaced Louisianian living in Calgary, AB Canada. He is a husband, father, minister, GM, and gaming convention planner. He and his game group plan Underground Con in Calgary, and he tries not to take too many breaks in his home game. No one really likes death, and for certain no one gets excited by the prospect of dying. When player characters die in a game, there is often fighting and fist shaking involved. For example: Seeton was a sorcerer,…
| April 12, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
Some campaigns are not that good, some are fine, and some are ones we never forget. In my last article I talked about my Elhal campaign, and how it was one of the great ones. In a discussion on G+ (btw, Circle +Gnome Stew), some Plussers asked me what made Elhal so great. So I did some soul searching, as well as asked some of my players and we came up with some factors that not only made Elhal great, but could make any game achieve…
| March 30, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I recently killed my All For One campaign even though there was nothing seriously wrong with it. It was doing ok, but it was not doing great. Overall I would give the campaign a solid C. It was missing that spark. The spark that separates an OK game from a great game. Once I admitted that spark was not there, it was time for it to go. I don’t want to run average campaigns anymore. Looking For Elhal In All The Wrong Places Four years…
| February 21, 2012 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
A couple years ago I wrote an article about how, while I consider myself a Gnome-worthy Game Master, I never managed to finish most of my campaigns. Sometimes I couldn’t do anything about it; circumstances ended the campaign. At other times, I was lucky enough to have some time to wrap things up. Gnome Stew Reader Jason recently asked: A campaign I am running needs to wind down early. The players want closure on the threads hanging in the story. Do I get them together…
| December 6, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
If you’ve ever played or run just about any edition of D&D, but especially 3.x or 4e, imagine this scenario: Your party of 1st-level PCs all start the game with +5 weapons and 9th-level spells (or for 4e, 20th-level powers). In the context of the average D&D game, those characters are essentially gods. Sure, they’re fragile, inexperienced gods, but boy are they going to be able to make up for those deficiencies in short order. For most D&D campaigns, this would present a problem —…
| October 7, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
With the conclusion of my most recent Corporation campaign, I have been working on the prep for my new All For One campaign. As with any new campaign I run, I like to try to shake things up, doing things differently from campaign to campaign. In my previous Corporation campaign there were very few reoccurring NPCs (largely because the players did not leave a lot of witnesses), and the missions were assigned out from the corporation but never personal. All of that was fine for…
