Award-Winning GMing Advice
Gnome Stew won the silver ENnie Award for Best Blog in
2011 and
2010 -- thank you for your support! Online since 2008, we've published
1,109 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
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This article looks at a parallel between RPGs and board games that I find interesting, but fair warning: If the last time you played a board game was a session of LCR with your grandma in 1982, it may not be as interesting to you.
So: board games and downtime.
In board games (and card games), "downtime" is the time you spend sitting around waiting for it to be your ...
I’m likely going to make the world meta-explode with this one, but let’s take that risk and talk about games. Not just the tabletop games we play, or the video games we play when we aren’t running a game or playing in one. No, let’s talk about games within the games we play. Amalgamation When we sit down to play a ...
Every Game Master has been in the situation where a player starts pursuing some course of action that you just can’t divine the purpose off. They attempt a long complicated string of skill rolls, roleplaying interactions, and other hare brained interactions to get to … well, you never quite know until the very end. Maybe they just wanted that extra +2 bonus, or to get a better ...
When I think back over 20-plus years as a gamer, only a few gaming products have ever felt truly magical to me. Two, to be precise.
Oh, there have been LOTS of standouts -- awesome products that have given me years of enjoyment and shaped how I game, and, by extension, that have played a role in making some of my best memories with friends.
Which is a pretty fucking ...
If you happen to do a search on the tag meta here on the stew, you’ll find that I tend to dominate use of the tag. That could be because I’m the only one who uses it, but it is also because the metagame is a key component in a lot of my Game Mastering philosophy. Looking it up on Dictionary.com, meta is defined as: ...
I'm no Luddite, but I've always been more of an analog campaign management kind of guy. I type up adventures and notes on my desktop, but print them out to use at the table; I've used Google Maps to create a custom "living" map for a modern game, but that game also ended with a two-inch thick binder of material on my shelf.
Having been out of the GM's ...
I've got a little story for you today, it came from my last game session and it centers around the kinds of rewards we, as GMs, give to players. Sure there are rewards of straight in-game currency, there are rewards of items that boost the characters' stats and abilities, and there are rewards of plot relevant items or information that help move the story along. There are also ...
A lot of my gaming friends and I are into gaming as a storytelling experience. I tend to talk about improving games and focusing on the story at the table. That is how a lot of my games go. However, some of the recent books I’ve been reading, some of the movies I’ve recently seen, and some of the games I’ve run in and played ...
I often find myself walking a fine line when it comes to the level of detail in a game. As both a Game Master and a player, I sometimes enjoy and sometimes hate the level of detail that a game setting provides. Sometimes I loathe being told the exact rights and duties of a particular cleric to a particular god and sometimes I love knowing how the ...
No form of entertainment is entirely realistic. Movies, video games, books, and pretty much any other form of media cut a lot of corners when portraying the world. If they didn’t, they would be bogged down with boring minutia and detail. However, a lot of gamers like the complexity and detail of “realistic” gaming. Without the challenged presented by these small challenges a tabletop game might not feel ...
I run very improv heavy game sessions. I also do a lot of sandbox style game. Because of this, there are a lot of nights around my gaming table where I’m picking at the players for some direction for the story. Sometimes the players know exactly where they wan to go, sometimes the players really just want to do “stuff” and want someone to tell them what that ...
Do you ever step back from being the Game Master for a second, look at what is going on in the game, and imagine the action at the table as if it were a TV show or a movie. Even the most boring combat I recently ran has been brought up by the players in their stories because of the cinematic qualities it had. Role-playing games, movies, and ...
As gamers we tend to think of high mechanical difficulties as bearing more drama and action. The less likely it is for us to make a roll or succeed at an action, the more exciting and tense the gaming will be. Sometimes this is true. Pulling off an incredible feat by rolling the natural 20, watching 10s explode to push you over the edge of the required number ...
I recently ran a game that had a far too long and not fun combat in it. The party size is a little bloated, and I had planned out a combat with lots of combatants (mostly mooks who got taken out very easily, but a few actual threats) that became very un-fun. The mooks didn't get creamed like I expected, one character decided he wasn't going to participate ...
A few days ago, after running a session, a thought struck me. It’s one of the most important things that I think can be asked by any Game Master: What do my players really want out of the game? While it’s a simple question, and something that doesn’t seem like it would be hard to figure out, a lot of groups get into the groove of playing a ...
