Award-Winning GMing Advice
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Encounter types are one of the variables with the most potential impact on games. From design, through character creation to adventure design, encounter type impacts the flavor and success of the game. For the purpose of this article, Encounter type is the main function of an encounter. Common examples include investigation, combat, social, magic, or other skills but games with odd focuses can have more unusual encounter ...
I'm a big proponent of using everything my players give me, especially when it comes to PC backgrounds: If you put it in there, I assume it's because you want to see it in the game, and I'll do my best to make that happen.
But why assume?
As a player, I design character backgrounds this way. I include NPCs my PC would love to fight, fuck, or otherwise interact ...
My new campaign is starting this weekend, and my group opted to make use of Dawn of Worlds to design the game world. Dawn of Worlds is a collaborative world building system for use with RPGs, novels, or anything else for which you'd need a world. It's system neutral which makes it useful for anyone, and it's a lot of fun in it's own right. We used Dawn of Worlds for ...
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today's Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Patrick Benson's article: You Do Not Have Time for That after reading this....
When I am not wearing my pointy hat here on Gnome Stew, or behind the screen GMing, I am a Project Manager (stop boo-ing..)
In Project Management there exists something we call the Triple Constraint. All ...
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today's Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Phil Vecchione's article Doubleheader: The Triple Constraint of A Campaign after reading this....
My father retired a few years back after several decades of being a union electrician for the Chicago Transit Authority. He was a foreman in charge of maintaining the signal services for several of the train ...
When you first think of running a campaign, there's probably one overwhelming motivation for your game. Whatever you do, don't forget it under the weight of all your research and preparation. Design your campaign to satisfy what you're aiming for.
My group's current D&D3.5 campaign was conceived with two strong motivations in mind. We knew 4e was coming, but we had lots of supplements for third ...
