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
1,110 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
two books for GMs. Our
top 30 articles make a great starting point for new readers.
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Of course, you already knew that, didn’t you? GMs have a number of jobs to do: think about the next session(s), prepare material, engage the players, drop hints and clues, introduce conflict, convey information to the group, manage the table, answer rules and setting questions, run the game (including all the little jobs therein), take notes, write up summaries, rinse and repeat. (Your mileage may ...
At Origins this year I ran a lot of games. Most of them went according to plan, many of them weren’t planned until the group sat at the table (which resulted in fighting Nazi Showgirls From Las Vegas), and one of them somehow turned into PvP session but still came out well. That is a horrible moment for a Game Master - when one of the players ...
The vast majority of people game with their friends, and if lucky their family. In real life, your relationship with them may be at best a democracy or at worst anarchy. In-game decisions are often made in a chaotic group-think where different people within the group assume different roles: the loud one, the peacemaker, the sage, etc. That kind of decentralized cooperation works fine when you are trying ...
Imagine this fairly common scenario: The character sheet talks about a backwoods, uneducated fighter with a low intelligence score. The player knows that the word puzzle on the wall can be solved by removing every third letter and putting the min order. The fighter might not know this, but the player does. Should the player be able to bring in their knowledge and find some way for the ...
Traditionally, being a player is an hourly job while being a GM is a salaried position (although both are usually unpaid). Players are expected to show up on time to a session, play the game, and clock out after the session, often giving it little thought until the next one.
GMs, on the other hand, have many responsibilities that transcend the session. While there certainly are GMs that can ...
