Posts Tagged by details
| November 1, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
With Halloween having just passed, many of you were likely to have been inundated with hordes of costumed trick-or-treaters or co-workers. Halloween is a wonderful holiday, and one of my favorites, primarily for the costumes. Donning a costume doesn’t change anything about the person wearing it, but it does change the perceptions of everyone seeing the person. My Indiana Jones costume is little more than the clothes and jacket that I wear to work on a daily basis, with the addition of a fedora.…
| June 10, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Details. I have such a love/hate relationship with details as a GM. Adding details to your game is like cooking with a powerful spice. If you add too little it is a waste, and if you add too much it overpowers the dish. You need to get the amount of the spice right for not just the dish as a whole, but for every single bite. It gets even worse though, because you have to get the amount of spice right for every single bite…
| January 20, 2012 | Posted by Scott Martin |
IcebergTitanic had a question that will hopefully end more successfully than his handle’s history. Similar to the questions on Metagaming, I would like to see an article on how a GM can give hints and clues for a story without the players immediately leaping upon it. You know, the old “if the GM mentioned it, it must be important!” Example: The PC’s are meeting an important dignitary for dinner, and the noble goes, “Ouch!” as he apparently gets a nasty splinter from his chair. The…
| September 1, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
As Game Masters, I think we’ve all been in the place where we get wrapped up in creating a world or game with an intricate backstory or lots of details. (When I refer to backstory throughout the rest of this article, I mean the intricate details that surround a world or campaign. ) Whether it is the detailed story of the intricate social-politcal relationships at court, the involved history of how the alien races came to be involved in the millenium long war, or just…
| May 30, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
A couple of weeks ago I was at a convention and got to jump into a game of Apocalypse World. Definitely an interesting system with some unique elements and ideas, but one of the things that struck me most about it was a very non-unique element – something I remember doing a long time ago and that somehow slipped out of my library of gaming tools. It was a simple element on all of the character playbooks and in some of the Game Master materials…
| July 16, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
As Game Masters we are in control of a lot of elements at the table. Not only are we responsible for adjucating the rules and mechanics of the game we are playing, we also are primarily responsible for crafting the story, playing the parts of the NPCs, engaging the players through their characters, and making a memorable play experience. At any one point in a game there are multiple things going on, and a lot of important details can get lost in the shuffle of…
| December 10, 2009 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
When I run my D&D 4e game I use a random encounter generator. I look at the stats for the various monsters, and I then put those monsters into the game. This might result in a zombie, some lizard people, a classic magical beast, and a handful of human minions being the encounter. If the PCs decide to travel into the woods that evening these monsters are suddenly re-skinned as various wild elves with a strange fey creature that acts as a watch dog. If…
