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This is written as a response to Quieo’s Suggestion Pot comment. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of this article I suggest checking out two of my other articles on improvising: Preparing to Improvise is all about the fundamentals of improvising as a GM. Improvising? Don’t Worry About Beginnings & Endings, Focus On Transitions gives you an easy to ...
Happy GM’s Day everybody! Tonight the Great Rules Lawyer sees his own shadow, slides down the chimney into your homes, and proceeds to hide your dice throughout the house while quoting contradicting supplements. This is why your players may give you gifts today, because they probably told him where you live so that he would leave their dice alone. The only way to prevent him from hiding your ...
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 ...
As a player I recently experienced two opposite approaches to how a game master can react to the players’ input during a session. One GM made sure to incorporate what the PCs did into the game, and the other made sure to keep the plot on track with what he had prepared. I am not going to go into the details, but guess which game sucked? ...
This year at Gen Con I attended a seminar given by Ramsey “Tome Wyrm” Lundock titled Secrets for Instant GMing. Focused on how a GM can improvise when the players do something unexpected the seminar was informative and well done. I enjoyed the seminar enough that I bought a copy of Lundock’s books Instant GM: A Bag of Tricks and Instant GM II: On Your Mark, Get Set, ...
Drawing maps, statting NPCs, writing plots, and preparing handouts. Prep work is still work no matter how you slice it. Improvising on the other hand is fun! You skip all of those tedious tasks and get right to the good stuff – running the game! I often improvise sessions and it works great for me. The players get a great game, and I don't have to spend days ...
