With the holidays approaching and schedules becoming more and more hectic many Game Masters are likely to suffer from cases of GM burnout. GMs aren't the only ones susceptible to burning out on gaming though. Players can burnout on gaming and not bring their usual gusto to the table or even decide not to show up at all. Here are some reasons for gamer burnout and some ...

Player narrative is a great tool that can be implemented into most roleplaying games. To succinctly define it, I would describe player narrative as the act of transferring narrative control over most of the story elements in the current scenario over to one or more of the players. While the Game Master is normally the one in charge of describing certain elements of the story, things such as ...

A while back I did a post about Inspiring the game, wherein I talked about various sources of inspiring moments that could be ported over to RPGs and some problems that might be encountered when doing that. This is a follow-up post to that one. I'm hoping to lay out a few sources of my own inspiration and chart the paths they took into games that I ...

NPC Naming. Wow do I hate coming up with NPC names of the fly. A throwaway NPC suddenly becomes important and then bam! the player asks for a name . . . . . . .. . Great. Moments like this often result in names like Pilo (pillow) or Pyul Que (Pool cue) because of things that happen to be in my line of sight, or they tend ...

I know when I get the urge to start GMing again it is usually because I have seen something so awesome, so incredible and so inspiring that I immediately think: "Wow. I need to run a game that gets at that feeling!" Sometimes this inspiring moment comes from reading a book, sometimes from becoming engrossed in the story or the mechanic of a video game and sometimes ...

I've got a player who loves D&D, except for the parts of anything that he thinks suck. This class is underpowered in this way, this power doesn't work most effectively, etc. He isn't a power gaming type and he isn't a houseruling type, but he turns to me as the GM to try to change/improve things. With that in mind I've got a few questions and a ...

I remember my first time GMing. It was after the third game I'd ever played in any system, ever. I caught the bug. I wanted to GM and do a better job than our current GM. Boy were there LOADS of things that I didn't know. I hadn't read enough of the powers and skills to know how to use them, I was too eager to ...

One of the things that I love to do at the gaming table is to create a sensory experience for the players. I like to use music to set the mood, handouts and props to give a tactile feel, and unique pieces of scenery on the gaming space to create a sense of perspective. I love to get the players mentally involved in the game with outside props ...

For all the times that I have run a game, it is never a full campaign that is talked about after the fact, but the individual moments that make the characters shine. When Sun the warrior battled the mythic beast in one on one combat, or when Quincy, Harq, and Rikana broke into the banking guild, teleported out, blamed Merrix D'Cannith and turned the Lord of Blades ...