Posts Tagged by improvisation
| October 20, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
I just got finished with my stint at Con on the Cob. I and the other gnomes, who schlepped it out to Ohio for the convention, had a blast. By and far one of the best moments of the convention for me was the total improv game I ran on Sunday. The title of it was “WHOSE GAME IS IT ANYWAYS” and the description read like this: “Ever feel like watching the Game Master wriggle? Well with this game you can. Absolutely nothing about this…
| February 22, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
When I’m playing but not GMing (as is the case right now), part of my brain is always watching — and trying to learn from — my GMs. During my group’s Eberron campaign session last night, I got to watch a great GM handle a tricky balancing act brilliantly, and I wanted to share some of what I took away from that experience. The Quick Setup The PCs in this campaign are special forces/spies/irregulars — folks hired to operate off the books and under the…
| 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…
| June 9, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
We’ve all been there: The game is going gangbusters, but it’s getting late. People have work or school in the morning, and you have to stop soon — even though the adventure isn’t over. Before my baby daughter Lark was in the picture, I was up for gaming until two or three in the morning on Saturday nights. I could sleep in the next day without any worries, so quitting time didn’t really matter. These days? I need my sleep. So what do you do…
| April 17, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
It took me some time to get used to the idea of emerging complexity for player character backgrounds and roleplaying elements (which I wrote about in its own article, Player Characters: Emerging Complexity is A-OK), but the concept is one I’ve always embraced as a GM. In this context, “emerging complexity” is the organic growth of a character from a sketch, or from little more than stats or the kernel of an idea, into a full-fledged personality with a rich set of roleplaying hooks, character…
| October 9, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Welcome the first in an ongoing series here on the Stew: 100-Word Solutions to GMing Problems! Every 100-Word Solutions post gets its start as a question I email out to the gnomes — a GMing conundrum of some sort. Here’s the first one: “You completely spaced out on game prep — it’s 30 minutes before your players show up for tonight’s game — an ongoing campaign — and you realize you’ve done zero prep. What do you do?” Our solutions are below (“What Would the…
