Posts Tagged by improvisation
| February 18, 2013 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
This is the second article in my final five series for Gnome Stew, and I have chosen this comment from reader Iomythica as the inspiration for today’s article: Sorry to see you go Patrick. You will be missed. I always found your methods of GMing interesting, and particularly well suited to narrative heavy games. I would like to see an article on “the top five things that make a great narrative style GM”. I would also love to see a final article on improvisational plotting.…
| October 26, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
As a GM you present, entertain, and lead others. Your role includes management of data and people as you track stats and determine who has the spotlight next. You describe various scenes in order to promote interest and inspire others to take action. These are the skills that if you practice them regularly will take your games from average to amazing. What if you could have access to an organization that teaches these very same skills and lets you practice them on a regular basis?…
| 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…
| April 13, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Sometimes you have to wing it, but the secret to improvising is that you have a set of plans and formulas that you can follow whenever you need to do so. This is a trick that I have used when a plot is not capturing my players’ attention, or if I am asked to run a game on short notice. It came from my wife’s following of the television show Glee, and her favorite musical numbers from the show which are the mashups where two…
| January 16, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
A while back I dropped an article talking about a prep method I used, called 3-3-3 Quick Prep. It’s a method composed mostly of bullet points to give some minimal structure to a game but allow for improvisation at the table. There were some requests in the comments to show some examples of it in play. Well, I am more than happy to oblige and dug up some old quick prep examples as well as making sure to detail some for the game I’m currently…
| November 2, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Anymore, I’m pretty much an improv only Game Master. I like getting down and making an awesome, intricate, and detailed game, but so often those types of games just blow up when the players get into them. You either have to reign players in to preserve the spiderweb of the plot, or you have to help set it on fire and fiddle away. So I’ve taken to improvising as much as I can for most any game I run. It just works better and tends…
