Posts Tagged by meta

9
Hot Button: To Meta Or Not To Meta?
November 12, 2010 Posted by

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: meta- 1.a prefix appearing in loanwords from Greek, with the meanings “after,” “along with,” “beyond,” “among,” “behind,” and productive in…

13
Going Digital: Using Obsidian Portal to Prep for, Run, and Document a Campaign
August 25, 2010 Posted by

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 chair for over 18 months (Alysia and I had our daughter, Lark, in February 2009, and…

11
Intangible Rewards – Character Development
December 3, 2009 Posted by

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 rewards that are fluffier and have less effect on the mechanical aspects of the game while increasing…

7
A Good Story Or A Good Game
November 10, 2009 Posted by

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 in highlighted something that bounces around my head from time to time: Good stories do not always make good game…

19
The Devil In The Details
October 27, 2009 Posted by

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 rules for “Zliargo Darts” work, even if I never use them. Details I Loathe Character attitude details. One…

16
Johnny’s Five – Five Things About Your Game That Will Never Beat The Reality Test
October 8, 2009 Posted by
GMingAdvice01

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 any different from a video game, to some people.  Here are 5 places where gaming will never…

5
Defining Goals
September 30, 2009 Posted by

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 is. It’s brewed, over the years, a lot of dark roasted Colombian thought in my coffee pot…

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