Posts Tagged by players
| January 23, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
This article was written for the first annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2012 NYNG challenge. This past weekend I wrapped up a 16-month Star Trek campaign, and ending it (always a tricky affair) made me think about how I started it — which in turn seemed like a pretty good topic to cover for NYNG. I’m going to talk specifics because this stuff all worked for me, and for this particular game, but the trick…
| December 6, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
If you’ve ever played or run just about any edition of D&D, but especially 3.x or 4e, imagine this scenario: Your party of 1st-level PCs all start the game with +5 weapons and 9th-level spells (or for 4e, 20th-level powers). In the context of the average D&D game, those characters are essentially gods. Sure, they’re fragile, inexperienced gods, but boy are they going to be able to make up for those deficiencies in short order. For most D&D campaigns, this would present a problem —…
| October 25, 2011 | Posted by Kurt "Telas" Schneider |
No, it’s not another article on the game charter (a/k/a the social contract). This is about an organizational charter or license for a group of adventurers. While I originally used this in a traditional fantasy game (it doesn’t get more trad than Greyhawk), it can be adapted to nearly any genre with a little manipulation. Call it deputizing the party, Letters of Marque and Reprisal, or a license to carry weapons. I had each player sign their character’s name, and when new characters joined, they…
| June 29, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Reading Walt’s recent Fair or Foul: Death by Fiat article reminded me of a related incident from many years ago — one that’s interesting to look back on, and which includes a surprising number of serious GMing problems. I was probably around 13 or 14 at the time, and was a the lone player in a solo Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campain. My character was ambushed by brigands and wasn’t able to fight them off. No problem — that’s part of the game, and I could…
| January 3, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Back in January, I wrote about using PC backgrounds as a campaign roadmap, and I’ve been putting a version of that concept into practice in my current Star Trek game. It’s been fun and it’s saved me time, so I thought it might be useful to you. Specifically, I used a version of the Three Things approach created by the Stew’s own Don Mappin: I asked my players for three things they want to see or do in the game, plus three NPCs I can…
| December 13, 2010 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
Years ago, before the Stew was cooking, I read a great essay by Richard Garfield written for The Horsemen of the Apocalypse anthology discussing how he came up with the idea of Magic:The Gathering. In the essay, he talked about the idea of playing the game outside of the game…a metagame, and how the metagame intensified the game. That got me thinking about Metagaming in RPG’s. It’s Not This… So most of us are familiar with the negative connotation of metagaming, defined in the D&D…
| November 18, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Over in Le Pote du Suggestiones, Gnome Stew reader gustavovp asked us a great question. As I was typing up a response that began “I don’t think there’s an article in this, because…” I realized that there was — and that many of our readers may not know about the Suggestion Pot at all. The Suggestion What, Now? Given that close to 4,000 of you read the Stew via RSS or email while around 1,000 of you visit the site itself, there’s a good chance…
