Posts Tagged by design
| August 7, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by reader Ben A., who has learned a lot about creating fun dungeons by playing the Legend of Zelda games. Thanks, Ben! The dungeon: One of the big staples of tabletop RPGs. While the word conjures up images of a Tolkien-esque band of treasure hunters looting a medieval crypt full of skeletons, the term “dungeon” could just as easily apply to a corporate research lab in Shadowrun or a supervillain’s secret lair in Mutants and Masterminds. Once the context is…
| March 9, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Are you planning a one-shot session for a convention game, or perhaps as a break from your regular campaign? Here is an easy to remember framework that you can start with to prepare a four hour game. 1 – The Villain You need a villain, and since this is a one-shot your villain needs to be over the top. An evil wizard tormenting the townspeople is not going to cut it. You need an evil wizard who is stealing the townspeople’s babies from them in…
| June 23, 2010 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
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 types like rocking out, scholarly debates, crafting, research, or romantic advances. From a design standpoint, the proportional mix…
| January 18, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
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 with; I build conflict into my characters’ pasts, and leave big, juicy pointers to future…
| May 1, 2009 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
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 a number of reasons, and coming away from it, I can say I’ve learned a few things…
| January 28, 2009 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
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 projects have three constraints that are related: Scope (what are we going to do?), Schedule…
| January 28, 2009 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
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 lines. That was his purpose in life for the majority of his years. I asked him…
