Posts Tagged by corporation
| July 20, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I made a mistake and it killed a campaign. It was avoidable, and had I been more patient when I started the campaign, I may have avoided it; but I didn’t. In hindsight it seems so obvious what I did and why it lead to the premature end of the campaign. I forgot an essential element of the game: character formation. The Quick Story Ok. Enough being mysterious. Here is what I was trying to do… I wanted to run a Corporation game using the Japanese…
| 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…
| 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…
| March 15, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
In my last installment of Prep-Lite, I talked about the concept of Wireframes & Skins; using and re-using condensed NPC stat blocks, as a way to reduce prep time. In this article I am going to discuss, in more detail, some of the assumptions I was working under, how I condensed the stats I needed, and how I populated different tiers of NPC’s. The Assumptions So lets start with a few assumptions that guide this whole process. You may or may not agree with all…
| January 20, 2011 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
Jokes. Movie quotes. What happened in Fringe last week. Talk about the new supplement that is coming out. Dinner plans. Discussion about why the new WOW update is the reason to join/leave. These things swirl about the game table every session. When left unchecked they can break down the 4th wall of the game, cause players to miss key information, and grind a session to a halt. It is frustrating to the GM and to the players, even when both are guilty parties. Keeping focus…
| January 8, 2010 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
While I love the creative and storytelling aspects of being a GM, also I love the mechanical aspects of games. In my downtime from running games and stirring the Stew, I read a lot of rulebooks, many for games I am not planning to run, just to read about different mechanics. I love to see how different designers handle skill checks, car chases, or character growth. With my background in science and computer programming, I find the idea of how a game designer models the…
| April 24, 2009 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
Let me tell you a story. Late last year, I concluded a three-year long Iron Heroes game. It was a great campaign, but it was a lot of work, and not without its drama. We parted company on good terms, but I was kind of happy to be out of that long-term relationship. However, I am not the kind of GM to be without a game, so after a month, I was ready to get back into the GMing scene. I started trolling for a…
