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If you've been GMing for any length of time then you've probably allowed your characters to have something you soon regretted. Sometimes it's handing a low-level character the +5 Holy Avenger, sometimes it's letting the investigative psychic have the mind-reading power, and sometimes it's letting the military characters acquire a lance of the most powerful mecha on the battlefield.
When such things happen, it can be difficult to "take ...
How long is it okay to make a player wait to rejoin the game after losing a character?
As I peruse RPG forums or read articles, I'm struck by the number of times I've come across some variant of this scenario:
Rob Roleplayer finally gets to play in Mr. Legendary GM's totally awesome campaign. Much fun was had by all and Rob Roleplayer remembers, with fondness, his character imprisoned for ...
At the beginning of my last game session I asked my players if any of them spent their experience points (this for WitchCraft, if it matters). Only one of them did, and he announced that he'd spent some points on improving his Martial Arts. That's when I threw him a curve ball.
I asked him to justify it.
He looked stunned, primarily because it's not something I normally ask. I ...
Have you ever killed a PC through fiat?
A while back I was running a street-level superheroes game. Realism (in as much as any game is "realistic") was emphasized, to the point that no one wore spandex and vigilante activity would get you arrested if caught. We also started with none of the PCs knowing each other, as relationships were supposed to be forged in game.
In what was going ...
While I rarely do this anymore I've found that it's quite common in some games, especially those where each member of the team is absolutely vital to its success, for PCs to be run while their players aren't at the session. Sometimes the absentee PC is given to another player; other times it's NPC-ed. Still, I've heard a number of exchanges similar to this:
GM: Sorry you couldn't make ...
With Villains & Vigilantes back in action this summer, I thought I'd revisit a topic that had always bugged me about that system. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great game at the time and actually found it rather elegant compared to some other contemporary supergames (and V&V's ads in Dragon Magazine actually included a fully statted hero or villain--how cool is that!?). But the one ...
Recently, I had a chance to play in a one-on-one game with a friend of mine who is just starting to get into Game Mastering. He has been world-building for a novel he is working on, but wanted to run some of his ideas as a game, in order to flesh out aspects of the world that don’t relate to his main plot. He’s been prepping and learning ...
Piggy-backing a bit on yesterday’s Johnny’s Five, one tool that I’ve found useful in fleshing out characters is to ask one question at the beginning of each session and let the players answer it (and answer it myself for NPCs).
The questions are generally “every day” type of stuff, things that have little impact on mechanics (unless you’re playing an RPG that includes mechanics for such things) but really ...
In my last Pathfinder session, one of the PCs was hit by a confusion spell from an unseen enemy and began attacking the rest of the party. As it turned out, this PC had only joined the existing group in the previous session under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Given the situation (and numerous failed Sense Motive checks) it wasn't a stretch for the PCs to feel that they were betrayed. They ...
